Farewell to "Cabby" Gallagher

I felt extremely honored to play my violin for the funeral of Caroline “Cabby” Gallagher on March 10th of this year. She had lived here in Battle Creek for many years, and when she died on March 7, she was 98 years old.

Cabby and I had an amazing relationship, for she spent her childhood in Wilmette, Illinois, just a block and a half east of our home. We didn’t know each other back then for she was 23 years older than I, and she had gone away to college and graduate school by the time I was born in 1939. But we felt as though we had sort of known each other even back then because we had attended the same grade school and high school and remembered some of the same wonderful teachers at both schools and even a few neighbors on our street.

The first time I actually met Cabby was up north of Traverse City, where she and her family had a very nice summer cottage just down the street from the cottage of Barbara Woodruff, a dear friend of mine. Then I next saw Cabby at Northpointe, where she lived for quite a while in her 90s. She always went to our Olde Tyme Music concerts as well as going to hear Brooks Grantier, his daughter Marguerite and me when we played recitals there. She also greeted me warmly when I played a number of times alone for the special lunches there.

When Cabby turned 97, she began to have trouble walking and moved down to the nursing home, Sterling House, in the south end of town. She missed me right away, she said, so she requested that I be allowed to go there and play my violin. As it turned out, they didn’t have a piano or organ, so when my friend and partner Brooks Grantier came to play with me, he brought his accordion. Even though it’s not as wonderful for accompanying as a piano or organ, the advantage is that Brooks, who loves to play by ear as much as I do, could walk all around with me, playing his accordion.

Because of all of these meetings and my resulting warm friendship with Cabby, I felt particularly honored to be asked to play for her service at the Congregational Church where she had been a member for many years. As we heard at the funeral service, she was truly an amazing woman who was a teacher and the wife of a fine man who was a colonel in the U.S. Air Force. She and her husband were both at the base at Pearl Harbor when it was attacked in early World War II. She and the other women and children were quickly sent back to America without knowing that they would ever see their husbands and fathers again. Fortunately her husband survived, and they were very happy together for 55 years, until he died in 1995.

As Rev. Thomas J. Ott said at the funeral, “She was a person who remained curious and open to new insights, new information, new perspectives, new discoveries all through her life.” He also said he learned that “She was the family grammarian, historian, and analyst of news and current events.”

Battle Creek has lost a true jewel, that’s for sure, and many folks will truly miss her.